However, water for domestic uses was rarely denied if a person did not have the pay for it, but stock water was sometimes as high as seventy-five cents a barrel. One time Adam Zimmerman went to Colorado to work to earn some money and in a month had earned twenty dollars, but his expenses going and coming cost seventeen dollars so he was not much better off. Another time a neighbor hired him for a day and gave him a rooster for pay, which died on the way home.

George Richardson tells of plowing tree claims for non-residents, who sometimes forgot to send the money for the work and Peter Jensen tells of the old sod schoolhouse where they had a few cracked boxes for desks and piled up sod for benches for the scholars. W. W. Waterman at Day postoffice could tell how "cancellations" fell off, because the people could not possibly spare the money for stamps and write to relatives and friends. But the people lived through the years of trial and have seen the later years of triumph come to pay them for the hardships and privations. Carl Pigeon, who had no use for his threshing machine outfit in the early nineties, has had plenty of work for it during the later years and has had a fine business, which shows the development and prosperity of the wheat and grain industry in Deuel county for some time

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

past. John Steward, who early saw what irrigation would do when water was applied to the fertile soil of the valleys changed to irrigated land and now has a fine farm and breeds Belgian horses, Hereford cattle, and Poland China hogs. So we could go on telling of the transition and prosperity of many of the early settlers who managed to stay through the hard years.